Board.KolibriOS.org

Overview

Who and why need this driver ? Let me tell you: it worth installing UniATA if vendor of your new motherboard do not want to supply you with drivers for your old OS. Or vice versa, you have old motherboard and want to install new Windows with it. Of course, it is possible to use standard (generic) drivers those most probably supports this hardware. But what about performance ? You will have PIO mode with 0.5 - 3 Mb/sec transfer rate. UniATA shall use DMA or UltraDMA and have up to 10 times better performance. There is still one common problem with modern hard driver of more than 128 Gb capacity (also known as LBA-48 or BigLba). Old OSes do not support such drives at all, new ones require latest Service Packs. UniATA has built-in support for large drives. And at last - upgrade or downgrade of the motherboard. If you simply connect your harddisk to different motherboard, the driver of the previous one shall not recognize new IDE controller. And the system shall not boot. You will have to connect everything back, change IDE drivers to generic ones, reboot and reconnect hardware again, then change drivers to new ones. You cannot even think about walking with bootable harddrive to some other computers. Or resign yourself to have 0.5 - 3 Mb/sec transfer rate. Since UniATA supports numerous IDE controllers and in addition is capable of driving all standard (onboard primary/secondary) controllers, this problem also appears to be solved. Below you can find more detailed and more technical feature list.

Features

• DMA/UDMA support (up to ATA-133) on known and generic DMA on unknown controllers
• LBA48 (large drives greater than 128Gb) support
• SerialATA support (SATA, SATA-2)
• NT3.51 (including i386 version), NT4, 2000, XP, 2003 support (may be 2005 - not tested)
• support of contiguous set of modes UDMA0-UDMA6 (ATA-16/25/33/44/66/100/133)
• Support of numerous IDE controllers and generic ATA/ATAPI
• no reinstall required when migrating to different IDE controller or motherboard.
• internal command queueing and optimized execution order of read/write requests
• user-mode device management utility atactl.exe. You can change data transfer mode (PIO/DMA/UDMA) on the fly.
• tuning Read/Write cache, transfer modes and many other things via Registry settings
• list of bad/unreliable blocks, to prevent driver from treating HDD but return error immediately (Nikolai Vorontsov).

Overview

Key features:

• The main IDEA of the project was taken from standard XP/2003 VGA.SYS display driver with generic VESA BIOS Extensions (VBE) 1.02/2.00/3.00+ support.
• VBEMP.DRV is a standard Windows 9x™ Video Display Driver.
• It supports ALL of MS Windows 9x™ Family (Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 98SE, Windows Me)
• It supports a wide range of videocards emulated via virtualization software: Bochs, QEMU, VMware, Innotek VirtualBox, Microsoft VirtualPC.
• For proper operation my driver expects that your video card's BIOS is 100%-compatible with VESA Video BIOS extensions specification. Nowdays there are many video cards that doesn't fully supports INT10 interface, which is provided by VESA/VBE standard (See VBE FAQ below for details).
• Supports VBE 2.00+ compliant PCI/AGP/PCI-E video cards with linear frame buffer.
• 256color(8bit), 16bit, 24bit, 32bit true color modes support.
• 320x200, 320x240, 320x400, 400x300, 512x384, 640x350, 640x400, 640x480, 720x400, 720x480, 720x576, 800x600, 1024x768, 1152x864, 1280x800, 1280x960, 1280x1024, 1400x1050, 1600x1200, 1792x1344, 1856x1392, 1920x1440, 2048x1536 if these resolutions are supported by your video card's BIOS. *
• Advanced Power Management (APM) and Monitor Detection support are provided by Windows itself.